This series of photo-collages is a graphic rumination on something that both Jewish and Gentile Americans cannot really comprehend. Including me.
What would it be like to know that you, your family and friends, and places of work and worship could be blown up at moment’s notice?
That is the daily reality for all Israelis.
Iran has no real grievances with the modern Jewish state of Israel or Jews. In fact, Jews have lived continuously in Persia (today’s Iran) for about 2,700 years. During WWII Iran was one of the safest places in the world for Jews. The Iranian government actively sheltered thousands of European Jews during the Holocaust.
Under the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1941 to 1979), both the Iran and Israel greatly benefited from close commercial and intelligence relationships.
Over the last 47 years, the Mullahs of Tehran have squandered approximately $50 billion on high tech armaments, the funding of violent proxy para-military groups, and terror networks against Israel. They provide a variety of operational support to intensify destabilizing regional conflicts. The sole purpose of the Iranian Islamic project was, and is, simply to destroy the Jewish state and murder its Jewish inhabitants.
The Mullahs also forfeited around $450 billion dollars in lost oil revenues due to international sanctions.
And still Iran could not defeat approximately 8 million Israeli Jews living in a land mass the size of New Jersey, with a large part of the country largely uninhabitable desert. Without oil. Keep in mind that Iran has a population of nearly 90 million people (about 11 times larger than Israel’s) and a land mass 75 to 80 times that of the Jewish state.
Iran has the third largest oil reserves in the world (just after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia) and 12% of the known petroleum reserves in the world. Iran’s vast educated and talented population should be living in the lap of first-world luxury instead of in semi-poverty with a crumbling infrastructure.
Ballistic and Hypersonic Missiles:
It is estimated that Iran currently has potentially 2,000 to 3,000 operational missiles to fire at Israel. Although the weapons are largely manufactured in Iran, virtually all the technology comes from despotic countries of China, North Korea, and Russia.
The “slow” ballistic missiles travel at 2,300 to 6,100 miles per hour; the faster hypersonic ones move at nearly 10,500 to 13,800 miles per hour. They can reach the Tel Aviv-to-Haifa corridor (which contains most of Israel’s top tech companies, elite universities, and over half the country’s population) in just four to fifteen minutes from launch sites in Iran.
The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) can destroy about 90% of the incoming hostile missiles through its layered high-tech missile defense network, but 10% get through. It costs Israel between $40,000 to $4,000,000 to shoot down a single Iranian missile.
It is estimated that Iranian missiles strikes during the current war have done nearly $1.1 billion in structural damage to Israel; killed 24; injured 7,000; and displaced about 5,000.
Although the Mullah’s missiles are not an existential threat to the Jewish state at this point, it drains Israel of scarce financial resources and creates a sense of underlying anxiety for the civilian population that enervates national will. It contributes to the roughly 270,000 Israelis that fled the country since October 7th 2023—many of them highly skilled high tech professionals.
Final Thoughts
During the height of the Holocaust in 1942, the Nazis and their local civilian collaborators murdered 13,000 to 15,000 innocent Jewish women, children, men, and the elderly each day for 100 days. In just over three months, antisemites exterminated 1.3 to 1.5 million Jewish lives.
From Israel’s founding in 1948 to today, approximately 26,000 Israeli soldiers, police, and security personnel have died, sacrificing their lives defending the Jewish state, and ultimately the entire Diaspora of worldwide Jewish communities.
Israel grew from its establishment about 78 years ago, with a population of about 615,000 largely impoverished Jews, to a highly advanced and prosperous “start up nation” of 8,000,000 Israeli Jews and an additional two million Christian and Muslim Israeli citizens.
It was a brutal trade-off, but Israel essentially replaced all the Jewish lives lost in the Holocaust and then some.
With founding of the state of Israel, Jewish people can finally defend themselves with significant power including nuclear and cyber weapons. That tends to infuriate Gentiles in both the largely free democratic world and the rest of humanity living under dictatorial governments.
The free world, especially its young people, might consider that the missiles being hurled at civilian Israelis could at some point be aimed at them. Just ask the Ukrainians.
The Iranian missiles are one of the basic military metaphors of our age. Malignant states like the Axis of Aggression composed of Russia, China, and North Korea can use relatively cheap weapons to circumvent advanced and costly defense systems.
In the end, what remains is the Free World’s will and ability to confront and contain (defeat might be impossible) both aggressive authoritarian ideologies and states and violent non-state actors.
Israel should be admired for its national courage, reliance, and perseverance in standing up to radical Islamic fascism from Iran. Not castigated and reviled for the inevitable tragedies of war against foe that uses its civilian populations as human shields and bloody propaganda images.
What remains is the Free World’s ability to fight and stand against raw evil like the U.S. did in the Second World War.